Rhythm of the Heart is a compelling memoir about Kim Heacox’s 30+ year relationship with the most iconic landscape in Alaska, a sister book to his 2005 Lyons book The Only Kayak, a PEN USA Literary Award finalist now in its seventh printing.

Woven throughout the personal narrative will be stories on the human and natural histories of the Denali National Park, garnished with a conservation polemic, much as Edward Abbey did with Desert Solitaire, and Rick Bass has done with any number of books (that continue to sell well). Heacox will write of Denali through an inspirational arc; to show how a place can touch a life, even save a life, quietly, profoundly, day after day, year after year, and how that saving multiplied by millions of lives over a century makes the world a better place.

Heacox makes the argument, through his beautiful and impassioned prose, that we must save these places so they in turn will save us. Denali National Park is the most accessible subarctic sanctuary in the world, and has awakened millions of people to what’s authentic, priceless and true.

Any serious student of spirituality and the American landscape must one day address his relationship with Alaska, and once in Alaska, he must confront Denali, the heart of the state, the state of the heart.

Kim Heacox has written eight books, four for National Geographic, five on biography and conservation.

Heacox’s The Only Kayak (Lyons, 2005), was a PEN USA Literary Award finalist in creative non-fiction and is now in its sixth printing. He has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel writing. His follow-up John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire was published in spring 2014.

A former ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, Kim lives in the little town of Gustavus (pop. 400, reachable only by boat or plane), next to Glacier Bay, where he and his wife, Melanie, are building the Glacier Bay Institute. In 2012 he was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park.

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